Fenixp

*drools*

Well, nemesis mechanics are new - and pretty cool.

Combat system looks quite rubbish. Shame there's no demo.

All right then, Hell is pretty!

It looks... Distinctly Pillars-like. I'm okay with this, except for the UI, but eh - I guess I've seen worse. Anyway, is the game only going to have 4 characters party?

Interview with NightDive founder Stephen Kick about the SS remake. Why!? I suffered trough the terrible RPG-like progression in SS2, why would I have to suffer trough it in the remake of the original as well? ... Oh right, I don't. I can just play the original and not drop any money on this. Oh well, at least I'm not excited anymore.

It kinda feels to me that only Obsidian employees who drew the short straws are working on it, and that it's likely to be the last patch developed for the game, well unless new major bugs emerge.

Monsters in Doom 2016 sometimes fight each other, in the hell levels anyway. I now feel kinda sad that I'm happy about all of these things which were present in the original game and got dropped in the name of games getting less gamey and more authentic.

Today, Doom 2016 gets an update which'll put a gameplay option in to center weapon, like so: It also fixes a bunch of bugs and stuff. Who cares. CENTERED WEAPONS!

Isn't it more like every other level-up for Baldur's Gate, in other words, whenever a new tier of spells unlocks? At any rate, I'd say too large jumps in power between levels pose a bit of a different problem, and that is the fact that the player's skill becomes a lot less relevant that way - when you can't beat an encounter, overcoming it is no longer a question of changing tactics, it's a question of gaining more levels. Sure, you should get a feeling of progression, but not to a point where you routinely start giving up encounters thinking "Meh, can't win it anyway". In my experience, Pillars hits about the right balance between player skill and character skill progression - of course, this is an extremely subjective view on the subject.

Try not to do pure trading runs for the purpose of trading runs, it's not a trading game, it's an exploration game. Gather and re-gather port reports. Greatest riches are buried in things you've not seen before.

MCA didn't work on the original, so eh... The faithful recreation would go out of the window right at "Brand new RPG mechanics!" bit

All right, the demo was cool, I'll seriously ponder backing it. I'm not too keen about "Updates to the core design" stretch goal tho, at the time, elites of the industry were working together to get the incredible game of System Shock and I can't see how SS2 mechanics thrown haphazardly into SS1 would really help anything. And yes, MCA should add "Professional KS stretch goal" to his resume. Edit: Nah, for as long as the 1.4 million stretch goal exists, I'm not backing this.

Yeah, lack of ability to properly explain itself is a big issue in Pillars. I have really only started enjoying progression mechanics on my second playtrough. Anyway, now for something completely different: Yup, Doom 4 again. And the maps. I never expected to see this kind of level design in a modern FPS ever again. The leves are huge, they loop around and onto themselves, with passages and rooms locked behind keycard / pressing levers / finding secret passages. And they're somewhat easier to navigate - better yet, if you don't want the game hand holding you, you can freely disable aids like objective markers or compass and just explore on your own, which is exactly what I'm doing right now. It's so damn good.

The main difference is that in Wasteland 2, your damage gets upped and that's it, whereas 'skill of the user' (as in the character, yes) unlocks more options with more levels gained by the character in Pillars. Weapon damage will not actually change much, it'll only really get modified by accuracy modifiers and trough ignoring DR but that's about it. And that's where Pillar's mechanics get really intriguing once you manage to dip below the surface - they're not very exciting superficially, but once you start making informed decisions while building your characters, you suddenly discover just how powerful these skills and items can be.

More importantly, Wasteland 2 has linear gear progression. There are guns which are inexplicably 100% more damaging than other guns. Linear progression in Pillars was very limited, and it would only happen very rarely that you'd find a piece of gear which is strictly better than another piece of gear, and even if you did, chances are you could enhance your current gear to be on par with the new gear. At the end of the day, skill of the user was much more essential than gear, as it should be in my opinion. However, Pillars was also filled with some amazing gear - it only differed in attributes like unique effects or damage type and it's up to your consideration and planning skills to make best use of such gear as opposed to the game saying "Yup, that's better, you should equip it." As to which approach is better, well... I guess that depends on player.

10 years ago, If someone told me that the true return to form of Doom will bear Bethesda's logo, I'd laugh. I ended up grinning in satisfaction. A lot.

"Just go and play, it'll be fine" is the advice I wanted to give too at first, but then I realized the moment I do that, Morka'll be pretty much guaranteed to hit the stacking bug big time :-P

The bug makes some enemies more and more powerful if you reload too much. It shouldn't really be noticeable most of the time, but you don't want to end up being one of the cases who does end up noticing.

To be fair I generally can't empathize with the notion of "I don't get rewards for gameplay, therefore gameplay is not rewarding" mentality, ingrained for the longest time in RPG players (and now starting to occupy MP shooters as well. Grrr.) Original Baldur's Gate gave you a lot of imaginary points for killing stuff, but for me, that didn't make the combat feel rewarding - I just progressed trough the game, kinda bored. Combat in Pillars is a lot more challenging tho so for me, winning more difficult encounters is the reward in and of itself, and if the game gives me entertaining new items, well that's fun progress on top of that. Edit: Darn DreamWayfarer and ninja-edits saying what I wanted to in oh so fewer words.

IIRC you can solo the game as all classes at highest difficulty, so I guess it should be quite possible at the very least due to rebalancing. It won't be easy tho.

I enjoyed the combat in PoE quite a lot, but there definitely was far too much of it. Well, it felt like too much of it anyway. I was never a fan of trash mobs at the best of times and honestly, I enjoyed encounters in PoE significantly more than similar ones in IE games where I just watched a bunch of character auto-attack for prolonged periods of time, but they're still massively lacking in variety. And I think that's their biggest issue, not necessarily their amount - but the fact that most encounters in PoE are more or less the same thing. You somewhat change your tactics as you encounter new set of foes in a new location, but that's about it. With that said, I kinda felt similarly about IE games. On the other hand, rtwp RPGs are still fairly rare, and I for one somewhat dislike turn-based combat and love rtwp. So I suppose I can be quite forgiving when a game with this system gets released. Oh and the character development system is incredibly flexible. Obsidian really nailed that bit for me (I mean, just check the character builds sub-forum)

You're HoonDing's alt too, Bartimaeus? ... The plot thickens.

Why are you guys acting like it's either a toggle button or two separate buttons? We live in amazing times with such technological marvels as being able to use over 100 keys on standard keyboards! And you can map every single one of these keys to a unique function too! Isn't that grand? There's absolutely no reason to not implement such a feature (and "it'll confuse n00bs" argument is pretty dumb, it doesn't have to get tutorialized, just put good old "Pause: Toggle", "Pause" and "Unpause" keys in the key config menu. I'm pretty sure it won't be any more confusing than separate "move", "interact" and "attack" buttons.)

... Yes. That's what he does with his life, creating alts and writing up negative Pillars of Eternity reviews.